Posts by Pete 2

At that size ...

... it might even be worth getting a tablet. I wonder if they'd do a version with a proper fold-out keyboard and Windows - that would be the ultimate.

No prizes for second best

> Baumgartner took the second-highest free-fall crown

Maybe that qualifies me for the 5-billionth "crown"?

Anyway, it's only the last few millimetres that matter

Doesn't even make the top 10

> computer attack is the most significant threat we face as a society, ...

So the guy contradicts himself in the very next breath (way to go, speech-writers). However, he's still wrong.

In no particular order, the threats I feel are most likely to have the greatest impact on ME, would be:

- economic downturn (again!)

- violent crime

- property crime

- traffic accident

- ill health

- corruption

- civil unrest

- energy prices (electricity, gas, petrol)

- bad weather

- social intolerance

and add on his particular paranoia: WMDs (surely an exclusively american fear? Bizarre, since they have most of them) and people messin' with computers doesn't even feature. Obviously the guy is telling his audience what they want to hear. By appealing to their vanity, he's obviously hoping to puff-up their own self importance (as if it needs any more bolstering), but his words appear trite and self-serving. He seems also to miss the point that to 95% of the world, the USA is a foreign intelligence agency - maybe there's a kernel of truth in his keynote, after all.

A new excellence fad?

> the gallery has astroturf on the floor instead of carpet

Ahh, so if the OGs are successful can we expect the country's CIOs and IT manglers to replace all the datacentre carpets with plastic grass?

It's probably as likely to be effective as any of the other initiatives they've tried: (ISO9000, BS5750, ITIL etc.) and for exactly the same reasons - random chance.

p.s. Lucky they took their lead from the field events, not the aquatic ones!

Can't tell their ASA from their elbow

> we considered that consumers would understand ...

What they really meant is that customers understand that ALL advertisements for broadband are universally false, misleading and that none of the claims can stand up to any level of scrutiny. Customers also understand that as a watchdog, the ASA does just that: watches. It doesn't act.

Can't happen soon enough

> Now TV isn't an addition to its satellite service, in the long term it’s a replacement for it

The fixed-fee "all you can eat" model for TV really does need sorting out. It rewards TV companies that fill their channels with cheap dross and repeats of cheap dross while making "quality" TV (i.e. programmes I like) marginalised and an endangered species.

If TV became truly PPV, so that a punter had to shell out before watching any particular programme, there would be a direct link between the programme maker and the viewer. Better yet, if a series tanked the makers would have an immediate and tangible motivation to improve it (rather than as some BBC writers are known to do: bleat about how the audience is "wrong" and blame the viewers).

The TV channel would merely become the delivery medium, much like UPS and the Royal Mail - they don't charge you £20 a month on the offchance there's a package you might want to order. By closing the gap between programme makers and programme consumers the industry can become far more response and efficient: no more cartels deciding for us what we'll be permitted to choose from, or when it's convenient for their schedules to show a particular programme.

All we'd have to do next would be to get the music industry to adopt the same model and get their fat-cats out of the way so we can get music directly from the bands and musicians, themselves.

Playing to the crowd

Well of course the rent-a-minister is going to say how wonderful and inspirational ham radio is when he/she/it is lying talking to the RADIO Society of GB. However IMHO (from experience) the internet took over all the interesting aspects of amateur radio.

Also, I'm sure the minister will be eating, nay: wolfing down, his words when someone whispers in his ear about all the cases of RFI that rigs can cause, especially in high-density housing estates and when surrounded by cheaply made and largely unshielded domestic electronics.

A bigger hammer?

Instead of relying on a single Copperhead, is it possible to insert (say) three into the propellant and fire them all at the same time.

Greater democracy?

> Proponents reckon it'll lead to greater democracy, as politicians are always answerable to those who fund them

Gets my vote for the most cynical justification of a new means of taking money from the credulous and dim-witted.

Watch and learn

> China – which produces 90 per cent of the world’s supply ... now has just 30 per cent of the world’s reserves

It seems to me they've been reading up on the history of OPEC and realised that there is a long (if not honourable) history of leveraging the supply and demand equation for their environmental reasons national profit.

Luckily for the chinese, it appears they are immune to the fate that befalls other countries who get in the way of " ... US workers and manufacturers [desire for] access to raw materials". I just wouldn't like to be in the shoes of whoever is sitting on top of the other 70% or the world's reserves.

Productivity != Creativity

Most office workers produce very little of any actual worth. Unless you count as useful sending numerous emails to hordes of people about things they don't care about (and probably won't read, anyway).

Far better than spending your travel time on the administrative equivalent of a hamster's wheel is to sit back, clear your mind and use the opportunity for some blue-sky thinking. All it would take would be one really good idea from one talented individual to recoup the whole cost of this new train-set.

Better than the alternative

I always assumed the country was run by a handful of tax-exiles, the popular press, some civil service mandarins and Simon Cowell.

Be careful what you wish for

So, presuming that CERN have spotted the Higgs. What's next?

In the popular mind the only reason for the billions spent on the LHC was to find the Higgs (before the yanks did). If it turns out that the scientists there have achieved that goal, how will they justify to the public spending oodles more euros?

Sure, from a scientific perspective, this is just one step down the path to enlightenment - but for yer avrige tabloid reader, how can they be sold the idea that there's still a lot more work to be done.

Unlike the moon landings where public interest dwindled after the "been there, done that" box got ticked, I hope that CERN soon manage to discover another great problem that needs even more billions, or the supercooled LHC could become the world's fastest ice-rink. Whetever CERN do propose for ongoing research, they're going to have their work cut out trying to get a catchier (if equally spurious) name than The God Particle.

For the most monumental screwups ...

don't focus on the sysadmins (competent, incompetent, overworked, lazy or malicious). Instead look at the system designers. Ultimately they are the ones who make the biggest, most expensive, longest lasting cockups imaginable - and some that extend a long, long way beyond what anyone thought was the limit of human stupidity.

The problem with trying to point the finger at the designers is that by the time the scale of their errors is known, it's all far too late. The systems go live, despite everyone knowing that they're utterly doomed. The processes needed to use and maintain them are complicated, error prone, people-intensive and unreliable. However the blame is never passed to those who created the shambles, it's always attributed to the person who pressed the badly designed button.

Talking the piss?

> Not only do we want to turn some heads and get people talking

Hopefully the heads won't be turned while "in full stream". It could get messy.

I'm just waiting for the first lawsuit claiming electrocution from a faulty unit.

Pain In The Orifice?

> "I don't want this to be PITO ..." said May.

And yet, it almost certainly will be. Although this body is being set up to reduce costs, in practice it's just another layer of administration, waste and confusion. I'm not convinced that anything the government does to centralise services ever results in a cost saving - it just results in more civil servants.

Put it in perspective

The article quotes government figures for the costs of this compliance. They bandy around £1m here and £53m there, as if we're supposed to throw up our hands in horror. What they keep very close and don't tell us is what these figures are as a proportion of everyday business costs across the whole country.

I realise that businesses don't like the idea of people actually having to give consent before they squirrel away terabytes of our personal information - just so they can pester us with adverts for stuff we don't want. However given the costs and turnover of british industry, even £147m in additional expenditure (or "jobs", as the traditionalists would have it) seems like a tiny drop in a very large ocean.

An equal and opposite reaction

It's hard to see how this will, in the long term, be anything other than a smokescreen. Assume for the sake of argument that the bill-payer in your household says "yes, filter me". How long will it take for workarounds to be developed, promoted and sold? Will there then be another law to make the circumvention of "active choice" illegal? [ This initiative sounds like it's capable of knocking "unlimited" off the top spot as the most abused word or phrase in internet parlance ]

Who will decide which sites become subject to censorship "choice". If you only want to block nasty smut, but let "good" smut through, will there be a half-choice, or the possibility of choosing "choice" only after certain times?

The biggest question though, is who will get to see what you've chosen. Will the information be made available to a police check? Will the register of choosers, or non-choosers be published for all to see? Can people who've chosen not to choose "choice" be employed to look after children? Will your employer, or prospective employer, get wind of your choices?

It seems to me that until the details have been bedded-in and a few test cases run through the courts, the only sensible solution is to fall in line with the sheep, choose choice and quietly explore the chinks in the choices.

Please miss!

Can we employ the same standards for our politicians?

Science is not a democracy

Just because the majority of the (uninformed and unqualified) public believe something to be true, doesn't make it so. The real world doesn't work like that - although I wouldn't be surprised to hear that most people think it should, and thus it shall be.

Just like we can't hold a referendum and vote away inflation, recession or other economic woes (and denying evolution doesn't make it stop - except among the deniers).

So it doesn't really matter what the majority of people think, hope or wish for. Science will still go on according to the Laws of Thermodynamics. The world will continue in its orbit as described by the Laws of Kepler and Einstein and politicians will still appeal to peoples' vanity by telling them that who they vote for will make a difference. All we can do is work out what the hell is ACTUALLY happening and use the best judgement of the small number of independent, yet qualified, souls to consider if anything can or should be done about it.

Que cera cera

How long is a piece of string?

What seems to happen is that one set of vested interests in the USA calls in a favour that their financial backing of politicians elections bought they (at least their politicians are honest: once bought, they stay bought) and "remind" said puppet lawmaker about all the goodness they've received - and now it's time for the quid pro quo.

Since the politician has nothing to gain from standing up for the little guy - he's a brit, so will never vote for an american politician - and a lot to lose from annoying his paymasters, so the extradition is demanded. The puppet strings are therefore extended across the Atlantic and the american government asks (a word that loses a lot in translation - "demands" is closer) for the warrant to be executed.

Again, the british Home Secretary has nothing to gain from annoying his/her/its puppet-master and a lot to lose from incurring their ire. So the form gets stamped and "justice" is done.

A guy gets shipped off to a foreign country. One where he cannot raise any sort of defence as the costs of flying witnesses over (at his expense), accommodating them until the trial calls them (again, he pays) and paying for an american defence team is crippling - even for british millionaires who've been shafted by this form of "justice". Hence he does what almost everyone else in his position does: makes a deal. Not only does that prove, in the eyes of their law, that he's guilty but it also justifies back to the HomSec that he/she/it was right in approving the extradition - "look, he pled guilty!"

In fact all that's happened is a commercial interest in one country has pulled the strings of a tame politician, who has yanked the chain of an emasculated and disinterested british minister. The level playing field of law then gets tilted massively in favour of the company and the defendant has no choice but to roll over, thus completing the circle and proving to all involved that the system works.

Risk assessment

It's also possible that the generation X's and Y's have experienced security problems (as the article says) and come to the conclusion that they're not that serious. Whereas the older users are more wary and consider that the internet is jam-packed full of scammers, con artists, viruses and phishing sites - all of which will suck your bank account dry (assuming the bank's online systems are working) as soon as you click on the site's link.

The younger users may well have encountered some of these "threats" and discovered that apart from some small inconvenience - such as having to run a cleaner, or fire up their AV suite - that nothing bad has actually happened: they didn't lose all their passwords, their bank accounts were left intact and nobody hacked their contact lists. Hence they're less scared of the consequences, having been there, experienced the actuality of an "attack" and come out smiling.

Alternatively, maybe the oldies just run Linux?

Single sourced

What's more interesting than peoples' reticence to switch banks is their reluctance to have more than one current account. We know, some through experience and some through sage advice, that it's unwise to only have 1 front-door key or a single kidney. Sure, you can get by with just the one but having a spare is a good move. Come the day you really, really need that fallback, it's already too late to try to get one.

As the article says, changing banks is easy. So is opening a new account. Having access to two sources of money (and maybe two separate credit cards - wallets do get lost, handbags do get stolen) is just as sensible - and it's free.

Sure, you get double the amount of paperwork. But in these days of internet banking it's just another password, or security dongle, to keep track of. The upside is that you don't have all you eggs in the same basket. So a bit of "local difficulty" with one bank's inept IT doesn't turn an inconvenience into a crisis.

There's the problem - right there

> Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic

Now if they'd used proper scientists instead of people who wander around on catwalks, maybe they'd have got some better data.

And to say that an Elephant Seal is better at doing climate surveys makes you wonder why we're spending so much money on obviously under-qualified scientists, too.